BORDERSCROSSERS

Bordercrossers presents a diasporic exploration that engages with conditions of displacement by pushing beyond the limits of normative approaches to organising time and place in critical expression.

This show builds on curator Rana Issa’s ongoing research on problems of rupture, dispossession, and extinction: forces that have transformed lifeworlds, environments, and ecologies through capitalist wars of extraction, immiseration, and environmental devastation worldwide. Taking Bordercrossers as a prismatic concept that challenges how borders organize our lives in space and time, the exhibition enacts a gesture of moving beyond: a crossing and transgression of borders that artists embody in their lives and practices, both in content and form. These artists approach the violence of borders as a historically recent human construction and are committed to exceeding political, social, and aesthetic forms of enclosure that have (de)formed social and ecological relations since the advent of Western colonialism.

The exhibition and public programme feature lens-based works by Mira Adoumier and Nour Ouayda, Nora Al-Badri, and newly commissioned works by Carmel Alabbasi and Robel Temesgen, who investigate how colonial extraction affects people and other creatures across diverse environments. The participating artists share a sustained interest in interrogating and experimenting with their materials, exploring the struggles against the devastation of war and colonial annexation by rethinking a variety of media, including photography, film, digital art, and sculpture. Their research-based approaches transgress the physical and abstract worlds of form. Their pieces challenge conventional practices in lens-based art, shaping expression at the limits of engagement with their mediums to break away from and escape the imposed paradigms of colonial capitalist violence.

Rana Issa is a writer, translator and cultural producer focusing on literary and contemporary artistic practices entangled with Arabic cultural history. She works at the intersection between public humanities, activist engagements, and academic curiosity. Rana’s work has appeared in leading journals, platforms and presses, and she has collaborations with international artists from the region in the fields of film, performance arts, visual arts, and sculpture. She is the Artistic Director of Masahat Festival. 

Mira Adoumier is a filmmaker, visual artist, and curator based in Oslo. Her work explores landscapes marked by displacement, peripheral histories, and layered temporalities, moving between essay film, fiction, and installation. Drawing on her experience of exile and her background in cinema, philosophy, biology, and psychology, she works with image, text, voice, and sound to create fragmentary, poetic forms that unsettle linear narratives and dominant ways of seeing. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Nour Ouayda, and is a guest lecturer at Kunstfilmskolen i Kabelvåg. Alongside her artistic practice, she curates film programs for art institutions and festivals and works as a cinematographer on artists’ films. 

Nour Ouayda is a filmmaker and film programmer. Her films experiment with various forms of fiction making in cinema. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Mira Adoumier and part of the editorial committee of the Montreal-based online film journal Hors Champ. Between 2018 and 2023, she was the partnerships coordinator then deputy director at Metropolis Cinema Association in Beirut where she managed and developed the Cinematheque Beirut project. She also teaches film programming in Beirut. 

is a paradisciplinary and conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. Her works are research-based as well as anticolonial. She lives and works in Berlin. She graduated in political sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and was a lecturer at the Eidgenössische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich until 2025. Her practice focuses on the politics and the emancipatory potential of new technologies such as machine intelligence or data sculpting. Al-Badri’s artistic material is a speculative archaeology from fossils to artefacts or performative interventions in museums and other public spaces, that respond to the inherent power structures.  

In 2025 she was a fellow and artist in residence at both Max Planck Institute for Humans and Computers and at Freie University Berlin. 

She has exhibited in the Viktoria and Albert Museums’ Applied Arts Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, Design Biennal Istanbul, ZKM Karlsruhe, KW Contemporary Berlin, Science Gallery Dublin, NRW Forum, Jeu De Paume Paris, European Media Art Festival, Transmediale, Space Fundacion Telefonica, Ars Electronica, REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater amongst others. 

Robel Temesgen holds a PhD in Artistic Research from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He received an MFA from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art, University of Tromsø, Norway in 2015 and a BFA in Fine Art (Painting) from Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University in 2010. Temesgen’s work has been widely exhibited in solo, and group shows on international platforms. He received several awards and fellowships: Lingen Art Prize (2022), Junge Akademie, Akademie der Kunst, Berlin (2018), and IASPIS, Stockholm (2017). He is a Lecturer at Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University, and has been teaching in several institutions, including the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. 

Carmel Alabbasi is a transdisciplinary artist exploring how colonial and patriarchal violence shape bodies, places, and identities. Through material experimentation and research-based practice, they bring Sufi philosophy into dialogue with contemporary physics as a means of detecting unseen probabilities within the present and questioning the limits of perception.